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Sapiens? Happier in houses or in animal hides?

In his recent tome Sapiens Yuval Noah Hariri has delivered a forceful and fascinating case for humanity's main exception as denizens of the animal kingdom being our ability to share in things that are imaginary. Examples include mathematics, governments, states, corporations, gods, social castes, and money.

Further examples the praxeologist could add society as an aggregate concept*.

Hariri employs the concept of the inter-subjective to explain how people, not just one person, accept these fictions over time and then employ them in day-to-day life. Inter-subjective means exactly what it sounds like, the meeting of one human-being's subjective reference frame with the equally subjective reference frame of another human-being. In other words it's the phenom that is studied by sociologists - or at least real ones.

When ideas can spread amongst people the incentive to increase linguistic articulacy increases and before long we have deities, shared cultural norms, dispute resolution and large-scale - compared to what other homo species can manage - organisation, for example in planning and making farms, cities and war.

Hariri posits that this may be why Homo Sapiens tribes defeated Homo Neanderthalensis bands and conquered the Middle East and Europe wholesale. The inter-subjective society of the neanderthals was simply too primitive to organise grand strategies

However, Hariri himself writes for the Guardian asking whether we were happier in the stone age. Of course the flippant answer would be that none of us lived then, we live now. In all seriousness, however, we have - according to new research published in Nature - changed inside in response to creating private property, farming, fishing, forestry and urbanity.

Strictly speaking the paper does not dissent from Hariri's reading of history. I am bringing it up to make clear that increasingly there is evidence that our constitutions have adapted to our sedentary new lives, and that in fact to assume away improvements in well-being is grossly disingenuous, nd amounts to the beginnings of eco-socialism through the back door.

I don't know if Hariri considers himself an eco-socialist but his analysis in that Guardian article arouses my suspicions since the Guardianistas and Independantes are known to be biased toward eco-socialism. All this 'you could be better off with less' rhetoric is all very well but unless somebody actually decides that they are, who am I to impose consumption-puritanism?

* I have no truck with the use of the term society to refer to 'a society' when talking about all of the people in a given space and time, but it must be remembered that it's only social (inter-subjective) bonds between real individual human-beings that have any objective reality, not the aggregate of a people.

Do read the links in the order in which they appear please. Finding the right comments in the third link might be quite interesting. They are all by a user called BestTrousers and start with "RI" meaning R1.

The main argument used by HealthcareEconomist3 is to give a survey of several works, while BestTrousers goes for comparative advantage.

Hopefully you good folks can indulge me by forgiving this post. It is an unfinished mess because I wanted it out there as the anchor for a hyperlink from a Reddit thread.At the momebt everything below is a jumble of notes, but I will be reworking it bit by bit starting today.Hopefully this post will be sorted out and typed in full before the end of April 2017.

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Historical materialism is the idea that history progresses in stages - slavery, then feudalism, then capitalism, then socialism, then communism - driven by changes in the technologies or techniques of production, and that any human civilisation will exemplify this process.

This makes historical materialism an exercise in both historicism and materialism.

Historicism is the idea that studying the past can reveal history's in-built course or narrative, and so show you the future.

Materialism is the idea that ideas ( and institutions) ultimately* don't matter in determining our destinies, and that therefore only material…

The idea that labor exploits capital is equally as plausible, sans assumptions*, as the idea that capital exploits labor. This is only intended as a response to the formal concept, descriptive or normative, of exploitation in Marx's schema from Capital Volume I.

* Assumptions include the power relation whereby capital is just assumed to be above labor hierarchically.

~ ~ Capital exploits labor because...
... Capital earns income from production done by labor that capital didn't perform
& ~ Labor exploits Capital because...
... Labor earns income from capital that labor didn't buy~
Basically in good old formal logic fashion both of those cases above, being factual descriptions, are true at once or are false at once.